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As it was published in Britain only a few days before the Virginia Tech shooting, Jodi Picoult could not have released her new novel at a more poignant time.
Nineteen Minutes is the latest entry in what fellow American author Lionel Shriver, who also wrote about the phenomenon in We Need To Talk About Kevin, has dubbed "the campus killer genre". Like Shriver, the New Hampshire-based author - who embarked on an extensive promotional tour of Britain in the immediate aftermath of Seung-Hui Cho's killing spree, which claimed 32 lives - has been frustrated by journalists who are only interested in talking about the tragic events of April 16. But as she tells an audience of her devoted followers, who have gathered in a marquee at the Essex County Cricket Club to hear her speak, she is no prophet.
"I couldn't have told you that it would happen at Virginia Tech, but I could have told you, as I did on the American tour, that we will have another shooting,' says Picoult, who emphasises that Nineteen Minutes was originally published in the United States in March. "And guess what, there's going to be another one, and it's for a lot of reasons but not necessarily the reasons that we hear about, especially here in the UK.'
Picoult is alluding to the British media's obsession with America's lack of gun control. When I speak to her, just before she takes to the stage, she bristles when I refer to Peter Houghton - the troubled teen who murders 10 people in a 19-minute rampage at the beginning of the novel - as "the gunman'.
"It's not about guns,' she says. "You have the gun control versus the non-gun control argument, which is an element of the book, and people will talk about it. But here in the UK, obviously since the Virginia Tech shooting, all you hear about is gun control. The book is about so much more than that, and to just talk about gun control is a very simplistic way to look at it.'
According to Picoult, Nineteen Minutes is about bullying and the devastating payback that people like Peter, who are alienated and abused from an early age, can inflict in later life. "It's basically the idea that I've always been insecure,' she says. "I was bullied as a child and my children have all been bullied. It sort of makes me wonder why in all this time we haven't figured some way to stop this. I look at this as a warning call to communities who think this is just a part of childhood instead of looking to address how we might fix this. It happens every day.'
Nineteen Minutes is a more openly emotional novel than the colder, more distant We Need To Talk About Kevin. Picoult also depicts both sides of the story, alternating between district court judge Alex Cormier, whose traumatised daughter Josie is a witness to the shootings, and her friend, midwife Lacy Houghton, whose son Peter is the perpetrator.
"If Lacy and Alex represent anything, it is different forms of parenting,' says Picoult. "I would argue that Lacy is a much better parent than Alex, but Lacy winds up with the kid who does a bad thing, so why is that?'
Picoult describes her books as novels about family, relationships and love, and she admits that the often controversial subjects she tackles are ethical and moral dilemmas that she faces as the mother of three teenage sons. Her breakthrough 1998 novel The Pact centred around two adolescent lovers whose joint suicide bid goes awry, while the lead character of last year's The Tenth Circle is a comic book artist whose daughter is date-raped. However, despite the fact that her stories often begin with a heinous crime and end with a courtroom drama, Picoult believes that her novels are not easy to categorise.
"It's really hard to classify my books by genre,' she says.
"You could call Nineteen Minutes a legal thriller, a family drama or women's fiction, although I think that's inaccurate. What about fiction? Nobody is going to walk into a bookstore and ask for the latest non-fiction research into the mind of a school shooter. But if you can get somebody involved in a story and take them along for the ride, at the end of it they've wound up thinking about really heavy issues that perhaps they weren't expecting to. I'm far from the first person to do this... Charles Dickens [used] commercial fiction to address a moral commentary.'
- Sunday Extra, HoS
